Putting it all together, seamlessly
PALO ALTO, Calif. — The bits that make up our digital lives are increasingly spread over a growing number of gadgets, such as cell phones that snap pictures, handheld computers that play music and a growing number of PCs that do all the above and more.
But amid all this connectedness, something has been left out: a seamless way for all the gadgets and all the computers to stay current with all the information captured, created and edited on other devices.
“Big companies have talked about doing this a long time, but we haven’t seen anyone deliver it yet,” said Gibu Thomas, co-founder and chief executive of Sharpcast Inc.
His 20-person startup is hoping to do just that.
For more than two years, it has been quietly working to come up with a way to enable behind-the-scenes synchronization across programs and devices.
Sharpcast’s service acts as a go-between among devices. If a file is created on a desktop PC, it’s seamlessly saved to a remote server, which other devices then access. Changes made to the file by any other device also are instantly synchronized with the others as soon as they’ve connected to the network. The latest file also can be accessed over the Web and can be tagged for private use or public sharing.
“Depending on what it is you’re moving and how much of it you can move, it could really be the next killer app,” said analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group. “It could relate to everything — from how you move movies, how you move music and how you move your pictures.”
Sharpcast unveiled its first product — a photo organizer — at the DEMO ‘06 tech show in Phoenix earlier this year.
At a presentation at Sharpcast’s office, Thomas imported pictures into the program and they immediately showed up on his Internet-linked cell phone. When he tagged the picture with a caption on the phone, it appeared instantly on the PC. When he snapped a picture with the camera phone, it instantly appeared on the PC.
“Any changes that I make are kept in sync in real time,” he said. “The idea is that you should be able to pick up where you left off, regardless of what device you’re on.”
Sharpcast plans to offer both a basic free service and a paid version that will allow greater storage or bandwidth. Pricing hasn’t been announced.
The photo-organizing tool is just a start. The company hopes that program and the service will draw wider interest in the underlying technology.
Eventually, Sharpcast’s platform could be built into applications from other companies and support other operating systems. For now, it runs only on PCs running Windows XP and handhelds or phones with Windows Mobile, though content posted on the Web through Sharpcast can be viewed through most any browser.